He stood deep in the yellow-walled canyon, the river at his feet. From the rim it looked like a silver-green ribbon, remote, a fantasy. Down here the river flowed up to the lip of rock and, in seamless grace and faith, bolted out into the empty air. Here it was roaring, churning, raw power.

Where it collided with the earth, several hundred feet below, the water chameleoned into spray and leapt back up the canyon, making the yellow walls glisten.

The man, a beaver trapper named Mac, looked at the river, and heard its roar, and felt its foam on his face. He bent a knee to drink its sweetness. Then he felt a temptation: Lie down upon the earth—you’re alone—no one will think you a fool. Sheepishly, he did. And there, through dirt and rock, he felt the elemental force of the cascade, he quivered to the surging of the earth’s blood.

He sat all afternoon by the great waterfall, staring, taking it in. It was a foolish thing to do, for he ought to have been hunting.

He was hungry. More than a week ago this very young man and his companions came through Two Ocean Pass, a place where one stream actually divided toward the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Then they descended into the land of boiling waters. Cursed country, their leader called it. Yet it was the most beautiful country the young man had ever seen.

Soon they camped east of the great lake formed by the great river, the Yellowstone. There the young man, a beginner at the craft of trapping beaver, a pilgrim in the mountains, rode out alone exploring. And got lost.

Lost! A pilgrim a thousand miles from civilization, and lost!

The next day he spent riding in circles on the high ridges, looking for camp. But he could not even see the great lake. The day after that the clouds dumped a foot of snow—it was September—and turned land and sky into a trackless sea. That was when he began to think that he was going to die.

Yet he was not so discontent to die in this fairyland. He went exploring, half hunting hopelessly for his companions, half sight-seeing in this amazing place. He chewed what jerked meat he had. He kept an eye out for elk—might as well die on a full stomach—and with mystic awe he beheld the wonders about him. Not cursed, he thought—enchanted.

Perhaps it was enchantment that came to him on the third night after the snowstorm. The young man was building a fire by a hot spring, where the ground was bare of snow. He looked up from his labor with flint and steel and saw an Indian at the edge of the clearing. The Indian was simply standing there, unmoving, evidently at ease, the carcass of a bighorn sheep slung over his shoulder.

It seemed a fairy tale. Or maybe the Indian was an apparition. The young man beckoned him to the fire. The Indian came. He stayed. They cooked and ate. The young man, hungry, ate greedily.

The Indian apparently had no horses. The young man supposed he was a member of the wild tribe that lived in these high mountains, called Sheep Eaters by the other Indians. Sheep Eaters were so poor they lived without horses and without guns, and kept to inaccessible mountains. The Indian said nothing. He acted neither friendly nor unfriendly. He did not respond to the young man’s attempts at sign language. When both men were satisfied, they slept. The young man felt trusting of the Indian as a child in an innocent dream. The next morning the Indian was gone, with the sheep.

Since he was young, scarcely more than a boy, the trapper did not know what in this country was mundane and what was miraculous. So he accepted the appearance and disappearance of the Indian equably, and set out looking for other wonders. The notion of death was strangely unreal to him. But if he was to die, he wanted to die full of miracles.

It seemed to him that the greatest of the miracles was the river, the Yellowstone, because it was exceedingly beautiful.

He had seen it further down, in the big valley it cut on the plains north of this mountainous plateau. There the Frenchmen, the first white men to see it, named it Roche Jaune, Yellow Stone, for its ocher rimrock. There lived the Indian tribes to whom it was now home, Crows, Blackfeet, Cheyennes, Sioux, and Assiniboin. They called it Elk River.

He had also seen the Yellowstone above its lake, where rivulets and creeks formed a slow-moving stream that coiled its way through marshy meadows surrounded by high ethereal peaks.

He had seen the lake, huge, cold-watered, unimaginably blue, home to gulls, bald eagles, ospreys, and even to pelicans. It was a marvelous lake, full of cutthroat trout, and bordered by the strange hot springs. The young man had heard old Gabe Bridger boast that in Yellowstone Lake you could catch a trout in one cast, and cook it in a hot spring on the way out. As with the other miracles, the young man believed.

Now the young man saw the river’s huge canyon. He stood by its majestic lower waterfall, and the lovely upper one. He saw the elfin sprays of water that joined the great river in the canyon. He saw the rapids and in imagination felt their furious force. He was consumed by the desire to follow the river forever, to see all that he could, to come to know it as a lover.

He did not know its past. Did not know about the hunting people who lived along it twelve thousand years ago, feeding on the mammoth and the giant bison. He did not know about the millennia this verdant country spent as an arid plain, a veldt, when the game and the hunters left, and gathering peoples replaced them.

He was barely aware of its present. He had seen the people who lived along the river now, both the shy Sheep Eaters of the high mountains and the tribes of the buffalo plains. He knew that the river was a throbbing artery that moved these peoples up and down in their boats, and an artery as well for the trappers, who used it to float their furs down the Yellowstone to the Missouri, and down the Missouri to St. Louis, a world away.

He imagined that one day steamboats would work their way up the Yellowstone, along its many miles as a majestic plains river. But they would never ply the river after it neared the mountains, after it became unpredictable and turbulent. They would never come here.

Standing by the great lower fall, the young man mused that to see the entire river, he must stay alive. And to stay alive he must hunt and eat—hunting was easy in this blessed Yellowstone country. He gave thought to rejoining his companions eventually—they would be at winter camp, at the mouth of Clarks Fork, two months from now. He decided to take the long way to the Clarks Fork, to follow the great river along its twisty, mountainous route. If he lived. And now he knew he would live.

He wanted to see all the creeks and rivers that braided together to make the single, mighty stream. He wanted to know all the personalities of the river, its places swift and slow, clear and murky, trickling and thundering; its many colors, the blue of the sky, the greens, the subtly varied browns, the reds over certain bottoms or in certain lights, the white in its rapids and falls; its bottoms of rock, gravel, weed, muck, and sand. He wanted to walk along its banks and step to the river at many spots and put a hand in, or a foot, and feel the river’s energy, its downhill movement, its suction, its electric, restless, irresistible current.

The young man got to his feet and looked back up the wall of the canyon where he had climbed down. A long, hard way, and harder going back up. He told himself it was time to stop being a romantic for a while, and become a hunter. And survive.

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1

June, 1843, Moon when the horses get fat

“Boys,” cried Skinhead, “I say the beaver that acts drunk, is drunk.” The fat man swigged deep from the water jug and pranced around the fire. Bald skull gleaming in the twilight, he leaned back and kicked his legs high in a strut. Then he started adding his own music to dance to. He flapped his elbows against his ribs and bawled an unmusical drone—Skinhead’s imitation of bagpipes, intended to be funny.

Well, what the hell. Mac Maclean did have reason to get drunk. It was his twenty-fourth birthday. The outfit was plumb out of whiskey. It was nearly out of powder, lead, and the other necessities of life, not to mention beads, cloth, and tobacco. Besides, this bagpiping sounded like a goosed mule wailing.

So Mac grabbed the jug of unblended, twelve-minute-old crick water. “To twenty-four,” he hollered, and swigged deep.

He imagined a gigue tune over Skinhead’s awful drone and stepped it out. The Indians didn’t call him Dancer for nothing. Mac loved to dance, and he had the knack for it. The girls in St. Louis used to flirt with him boldly because he had a reputation as a dancer. What would they think of him now, a civilization away from St. Louis, broke, dirty, smelly, and pretending to be drunk on crick water?

He did feel a little giddy. It was true—if you pretended to be drunk, you felt drunk. “
Twenty-four
,” Mac roared, “and an aimless wanderer on the empty, barren plains of the West, among the benighted savages.”

Til, Skinhead’s nephew, took the jug, drank, and echoed, “Twenty-four!”

Jim Sykes, the Indian, made his usual mocking sign for talking too much, fingers tapping thumb rapidly, and joined Mac in the dance. Jim was agile and could pick up a step with casual ease that Mac had worked to learn. “Here dances Robert Burns Maclean, a Scot,” Mac cried out. A Scot all right, red-haired, fair-skinned, slight of frame, and boyishly appealing. The two of them jigged to Skinhead’s ridiculous music. “A thousand miles from civilization,” hollered Mac. “Dressed in rags. Indifferently mounted. Partnered up with three villains.” This last was sort of true. “Far from the succor of white women.” Indian women aplenty, and for any purpose, but no white women. “Devoted to a dying craft, the pursuit of the wily beaver.” Poetically put, but factual. “Afflicted equally with lice and mad fantasies of freedom. And broke—thoroughly, disgustingly, heartbreakingly broke.”

“Give us a song,” urged Jim, still sticking with Mac’s steps. A Delaware, Jim had a strange, soft, singsong voice, like a saw blade fiddled. Mac obbligatoed a song over Skinhead’s drone. And he noticed Til had his Jew’s harp out, twanging away.

Skinhead looked out toward the horses—a mountaineer’s habit. They were picketed not ten yards away, beside the single bale of furs.

A raggletaggle band of trappers, beaten-down, worn-out. Mac was thin and hard as outhouse boards. Scraggly sons of bitches, too, everything but Skinhead’s bald pate needing a shave. Their buckskins were holey and black with dirt—they wouldn’t last another season.

Might as well dance, thought Mac. In fact, in the last of the pale twilight of a soft June day in the north country, he felt melancholy. Well and good to roam. Well and good to be free, owe no one, promise no one. Well and good to follow the beaver and the buffalo. But these men were on the spot, worried about getting to Fort Mackenzie without powder and lead. “If the Blackfeet attack,” Skinhead said, “we’ll have to beat the niggers off with wiping sticks.” Might as well dance.

Skinhead handed Mac the jug. “Drink up, coon. On your birthday you gotta have some fun, whether you want to or not.” Skinhead raised his own cup. “To crazy good times. Act drunk and you’ll feel drunk.”

Mac cut loose. His body swayed like grass in the wind. He was dancing till the moon shone high, dancing till the sun came up, dancing until the end of time. It was idiotic, but it was fun.

“This child loves whiskey,” cried Skinhead. Maybe this was the best way to get drunk, thought Mac. No hangover.

Skinhead suddenly switched to a boatman’s ditty. He knew plenty of those, and they suited his style better. Mac and Jim went right along.

Mac noticed the horses stirring—all the noise sure didn’t calm them—but he didn’t care. That’s what picket pins were for.

Skinhead switched songs again, motioning that he wanted to strut alone. It was a drinking song this time. He thumped his cup into his hand and danced a drunken stomp.

“Whiskey-y-y-y,” he roared, head thrown back, face to the sky. He reached down, picked up his rawhide rope, and began to march, bellowing out the beat and swirling that rope out in front. Skinhead had put in some time out among the Californios and could make a rope do tricks. He marched straight away, toward the horses. Mac was afraid he might scare them.

Skinhead, getting fancy, lowered the whirling loop to knee-high and kicked his feet through by turns. Then he sent the loop straight into the sky.

Suddenly—what the hell?—the rope snaked out ten yards into the dark. Mac heard nasty words in the Blackfoot language.

“Hey, beavers,” called Skinhead, “look what I got.”

Something dragged on the end of Skinhead’s rope, bouncing roughly toward the fire. A human shape. A Blackfoot. A very mortified Blackfoot.

“Boys,” crowed Skinhead, “I done roped us a Magpie. Magpie is an old friend, and he loves horses. Particular this child’s horses.”

Every man stood hangdog still, looking disagreeable.

Mac and Jim were irked at Skinhead for his stunt—if he heard someone out by the horses, why didn’t he let everyone know, instead of going off solo?

Til was miffed because he had to hold the wiping stick through the thongs that bound Magpie’s hands and twist them if Skinhead felt ornery.

Magpie looked disagreeable because Til was hurting him.

Skinhead was mad because his partners wouldn’t shoot at the damned Blackfoot.

It seemed that Magpie was an old enemy of Skinhead’s. A Blood, which was a kind of Blackfoot. Seemed the Indian once got drunk and traded Skinhead his wife for the night. When the whiskey ran out early, Magpie sought out the two of them and kicked Skinhead right out of the saddle and took back the woman, and Skinhead’s pants and moccasins and knife and pistol besides.

Mac gathered that there had been a couple of other episodes of enmity since then. A friendly, edgy, show-the-other-bastard-up enmity.

“This child don’t want to kill the nigger,” said Skinhead. “Just torment him for his insolence.”

Trying to run off the horses in the twilight was pretty insolent, thought Mac. And the bastard nearly pulled it off, which would have left the four trappers really gut-busted.

So Skinhead proposed that they let Magpie run and shoot at his feet. Just to teach him.

“Nix,” said Jim.

“We ain’t gonna waste ammunition on this,” said Mac. Even Til shook his head. The outfit was low on powder and low on lead balls—Skinhead was completely out of balls for his .39-caliber. “And no way we can let him go now that he knows we’re short on shooting materials.”

“Bastard’s got no English,” answered Skinhead.

“Use your Green River,” said Jim.

“No sport in killing him,” snapped Skinhead, going into a sulk. Then a wicked smile curled the corners of his mouth. He began to chuckle. “I’ll shoot the son of a bitch with that.” He grabbed for the wiping stick.

Til let go and jumped back. The wiping stick was pushed through the whangs binding Magpie’s hands. Til was half afraid of his uncle Skinhead when he got crazy like this.

Mac and Jim looked exasperatedly at each other. Skinhead gave the stick a little twist out of meanness and pushed the Blood to the ground backward. The Indian’s face was frozen in stony indifference. Mac admired that.

“Not your wiping stick!” Mac exclaimed, sort of tickled. A good hickory wiping stick would cost plenty at the fort, and Skinhead didn’t have enough to trade for powder and lead. But the fat man would do anything in one of his tirades.

Skinhead had the stick out.

“Just shoot a patch,” said Jim softly. “Scare him to death.” Jim has clever ideas, thought Mac. The wadding that went behind the ball would shoot all right, but it wouldn’t penetrate.

But Skinhead was having a good old time now. He measured powder into his flintlock and jammed some patches down on top of it, then the wiping stick. It jutted out like a finger.

“Magpie, you son of a whore, you wiper of babies’ bottoms, this child is going to let you run for your life.”

Skinhead cut Magpie’s bonds with his patch knife and backed off.

Mac had to admit it was an ingenious solution: sport without cruelty.

Magpie finished rubbing his hands and reached for his knife, tomahawk, and musket on the ground.

“A-a-a,” Skinhead said nasally, like scolding a cat.

The Indian stood up and waited.

“Start running, you son of a bitch,” Skinhead ordered.

Magpie didn’t move. Mac thought his eyes were glinting a little—maybe the Blackfoot knew what Skinhead had said.

“Run!” Skinhead thundered. He did a little pantomime of running and lost his broad-brimmed hat. His scalp gleamed in the twilight.

Magpie didn’t move.

Skinhead set the butt of his flinter on the ground and made signs. Magpie nodded. He made signs back, smiling a little. Mac read something about Skinhead’s father and an unnatural act with a horse. Skinhead glared and motioned him off, fast.

The Indian started trotting. Twenty yards off he turned it into a skip, then he put in a crazy sideways jump. Fifty yards out he did a cartwheel and some gyrating dance steps.

“Show-off bastard, ain’t he?” said Mac.

“This child has changed his mind,” said Skinhead. “I’m gonna shoot him center.”

“Wagh!” grunted Jim in approval.

Skinhead held on Magpie. Now the Indian was swooping, arms out, floating to the ground. Magpie’s signature dance, a magpie. Skinhead’s muzzle followed him back and forth, steady.

Flint struck, spark jumped, and white smoke belched. Mac caught a glimpse of something far beyond Magpie, sailing up like a spear, glinting in the last of the light.

“Keep your head down, Lord,” bellowed Skinhead.

Magpie turned and made some signs. Too far to read. Mac raised his own rifle to his shoulder and leveled. “Shoot him,” said Skinhead. “He’s my birthday present to you.”

Mac shook his head. The Indian started trotting off.

“Even the damn Blackfeet ain’t worth killing anymore,” Skinhead muttered.

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